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Does this have anything to do with CSS? Or is it just another bug in Safari? Or do I misunderstand?

That's kind of a false dichotomy, since once you understand CSS rules on something such that it works somewhere, you spend a lot of time interpreting addendums on caniuse and trying to arrange graceful degradation.

If you only have to make it work on one browser with one version, or if the feature is extremely old, or if you can do it outside a larger system of constraints, then you can just follow the step-by-step guides the article is complaining about.

Yes, it has to do with CSS. I could have mentioned a zillion bugs in Chrome or Firefox (the only remaining major renderers), but the bugs aren’t the point. There’s far more than rectangles at work when you actually need to render things in a browser.

> There’s far more than rectangles at work when you actually need to render things in a browser.

Indeed. You're entirely correct.

But with CSS the basis is that general "everything is a rectangle" model - which makes it easier to adapt to new features when they're introduced - compared to having to basically learn-from-scratch when new layout features are added to other systems.

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